Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.
Is it? Or is it "bloody obvious" to morons who mindlessly accept whatever they are told? The world is always collapsing right?
> Check out what teachers have to say about the attention span of the current generation pupils.
Before smartphones, it was TV. TV was rotting kids' brains. But the world didn't end. Did it? Besides, aren't teachers really complaining about smartphones usage DURING class?
It's dumb chicken littles like you that are the bane of freedom and civilization.
The don't tread on me angle is just as overplayed as the one you're complaining about.
> Aim higher.
Touch grass.
> The don't tread on me angle is just as overplayed as the one you're complaining about.
Not as overplayed as the passive aggressive social engineering sneaks like you. Aim higher.
HN is full of manipulative tone policing by people who can't argue, and it's refreshing to see someone put their foot down.
Agree. A simple solution would be to regulate social media by forcing a maximum time per user per day or banning it altogether. But that's clearly not the agenda. (same with all the other dog-whistles).
> Anyway, the government can already take away your bank account. No need for them to introduce such a complex scheme.
But currently they can't match anonymous social media profiles to IDs or bank accounts. This is why they want a mandatory "Digital ID" for social media.
When I was growing up, I had very limited access to real life social spaces that I actually enjoyed participating in. Online communities were my respite, the light in the darkness that honestly kept me alive until I managed to make it to college. If there was an overbearing nanny state preventing me from knowing that there was a better life waiting for me after grade school, I'm not sure I would've bothered to stick around until then.
That said, most of modern social media isn't the same as the online communities I and many others grew up on. It's a free for all with very thin walls between social spaces, almost no human oversight, and run by the most despicable and immoral people on God's green earth. So I am inclined to agree with the people who say that kind of social media is a bad influence and should be curtailed.
But even today, that isn't everything that's on the internet these days. Discord especially has quietly become the socialization hub of most of the younger folks I know of, and a large part of that is because it allows the creation of private, invite-only groups moderated by actual people. As far as I'm concerned, the Internet needs more Discords and fewer Twitters and Instagrams. There shouldn't be an arbitrary limit on socialization, but socializing should be...social, not some weird performance art done in front of the entire internet.
then let the courts decide. they'll clean up their act pretty quick when lawsuits come pouring in, and it removes the central govt's role in USER ID's and other 1984 schemes.
So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents? That's totally something that I could picture happening under such a regime. And that's ultimately indicative of a larger conundrum we face as a society.
The fact that as a society we seem to favor giving parents the ability to make their children in their own image, over giving their children the leeway to figure out who they truly are outside of their parent's guidance. And that's a truly difficult line to tack. Sometimes the parents are 100% right and the children would self-destruct under their own supervision. Other times, the children are being abused and tortured for not following the whims of their selfish parents.
I was lucky, all things considered. My parents were well meaning, just extremely overbearing and micro-managing. Some of the outright abuse that some of my acquaintances describe undergoing would make y'all sick if repeated here. I don't know if there's any solution, but I'm not sure giving helicopter parents more leverage against social spaces is the right play.
Why not. In a court of law, and facts, such lawsuits would only serve to highlight that religion is not a real thing. That would be a good thing for the world.
It was the same in the past. The difference is that the house odds were different. You didn't have algorithms cramming the worst of the worst down your feed, forums, IRC, message boards and the like weren't built with the goal of maximizing engagement. Heck, even vote based communities which inevitably turn into low common denominator groupthink producing cesspits are mild compared to modern stuff.
This is indeed a problem. Especially when growing up in a small town you can get stuck in a monoculture where people all have the same interests (I think in the US that's often sports and religion I think, in my case it was a bit different). I have zero interests in any of those and I don't do pretend. So I never fit in well either.
I also started looking for online places and started embracing being different. It wasn't easy but it did shape who I am. I'm still very much in alt cultures now.
These days I live in big cities where it's much easier to find groups to fit me than to try and fit in to whatever monoculture exists.
The only person that hasn't degraded is my grandma as the only internet feature she uses are video calls.
“It’s for the children” is the siren song of tyranny.
I've read that after elementary school parents have an incredibly small impact on their children's development, peers and their environment (which includes virtual one), has virtually all of the impact on your children's development.
This bs of government forcing everyone in the country to have to doxx themselves just so preschoolers can't access social media(which they will anyway since rebellious children are very resourceful on cheating the system made by tech illiterate adults), is like if prehistoric humanity were to stop using fire just because the village idiot burned his house down.
Collective action? Like some sort of communist? No THANK you!
Your sarcastic jab doesn't add any new questions or answers to this very important issue, since everyone can agree social media is bad for kids, but also we don't want to lose internet anonymity just because schools and parents can't raise kids without giving them a smartphone in hand since birth.
You can get a dumb phone since having a phone (not necessarily smart) is a good idea. There's also parental controls on at least Android smartphones that let you control the apps and sites they get access to.
Skipping lunch and saving up the dinner money to spend on an ex-demo Performa 5200 and a 56k modem is how I got online back in the late 90s.
Your parents couldn’t be arsed to cook even a single meal for you?
The child is also not going to have access to their home wifi unless their parents provide the password. That network is also totally in their control. They can setup a firewall.
School networks should also have firewalls, if they even provide wifi to the students which arguably they shouldn't.
The only remaining way to get internet access is through open networks on restaurants, etc.
If the child is old enough to be hanging around outside like that though, they're likely old enough for social media, I think.
Before I left the UK, there were remarkably good options for PAYG as both a phone SIM and mobile internet dongles.
Does the USA not have PAYG options?
Not when I got one (… two … no, three…). No idea what current rules are, may have changed, but back when I lived in the UK you'd find stacks of SIMs on supermarket shelves for £0.99 each, no questions asked. Topping them up was also no questions asked.
It's possible there was a tickbox somewhere for "you agree to the T&Cs", that's the kind of thing that I'd not even remember, but no actual signature was needed.
Germany (where I live now) needs a proof of ID to register a SIM, so did Kenya when I visited, but the UK hadn't done anything like that by the time I left the country.
A more extreme policy would be to treat smartphones themselves the same way we treat alcohol and cigarettes, enforcing an age minimum at the point of purchase. Of course the giant tech corporations would fly into rage over this suggestion and lobby heavily against it.
It's not though. That's just the popular meme among easily influenced and excitable social groups (like parents). It's not reflective of reality. The idea that mobile devices are somehow damaging to mental state is not supported by scientific studies. Nor is the idea that online discussion forums and markets are.
What is dangerous is mis-using medical terms like "addiction" in apparently an intended medical context. When you start throwing around words like addiction governments get really excited about their ability to use force and start hurting and imprisoning people. Even murdering them. Multi-media screens are not addictive. There is no evidence supporting such assertions in reputable scientific journals.
Here's a review (a paper that collects results of many other papers) from 2022:
Social studies are useless anyway. Academic social studies are so biased that anything they say on the matter should be discarded. They will always produce "evidence" on demand for whatever the left want to do.
Social media should be left alone. Parents who want to can block it on their children's devices. There's nothing more that needs to be done.
vile
This study is taking "problematic social media use" as it's implicit given and then from this arbitrary base it is then saying this small subset of problematic people experience depression because of the fiat declaration of "problematic".
But then it goes on,
>While there exists no official diagnostic term or measurement, Andreassen et al [17] developed the Facebook Addiction Scale, which measures features of substance use disorder such as salience, tolerance, preoccupation, impaired role performance, loss of control, and withdrawal, to systematically score problematic Facebook use.
Which isn't even a real journal article but instead a comment in a non-research paper which hasn't ever even been cited by anyone else until this paper. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C29&q=Dev... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22662404/
This is not real science. This is anti-facebook political manipulation via science sounding words. I'm plenty anti-facebook myself but I am very pro-science so it's sad to see this successfully masquerading as real science.
It's much easier to say to a child "you can't have a social media account, it's the law because experts have determined it's not healthy at your age" than "your mother and I think that social media is bad for you".
It didn’t work very well.
source: was once a child
There are all sorts of things that would be easier for parents to prohibit if the government made it illegal: Popular toys, M&M's, pork, anything that questions the bible...
Some schools have these rules, but unless they are practically enforced, kids get around it.
I worry these laws will result in the worse of both worlds.
We need really well moderated forums for kids, along with practical bans for everything else.
I’m not sure how that happens.
They wouldn't have a clue. Hell, I personally had this addiction for a long time and it just takes too long to see what a horrible experience it is in the long term. You can argue you should be able to do whatever you want at any age, I'm not the person to say anything about that.
But I totally agree that, as other comments point out, they use it as a justification for all sort of surveillance, I don't really think it is necessary to go that hard because whoever want to get access, they will. It's the internet after all.
asking households to voluntarily leave is like asking people not to get fat -- ain't gonna work, esp. when mega corporations want you to consume consume consume.
it needs to be a law, and it needs to be enforced.
That wouldn’t solve anything.
We all agree there's a problem. But simply letting the .gov do whatever it finds convenient will likely not solve the problem any better than any other option, and will likely make a whole bunch of other things way worse.
But that's fine because it's for the children, right?
Such as?
Facebook knew for years its social media was hurting the mental health of teenagers, and not only they doubled down on it because it makes money, they will also face zero consequences.
Corporate self-regulation is a myth.
We could have a real conversation about tradeoffs (and maybe this one isn't worth it!) but not if you just assume/pretend the worst-case scenario is real. I'm Australian and I'll happily bet that N years from now I'll still be able to criticize the government without being debanked or sacked.
If we do ever fall to authoritarianism, I doubt this will have been a crucial step; it's already easy for the government to deanonymize most posters if it wants to, and an evil future government that wanted to go further could probably just... do it, regardless of precedent.
I'm not a libertarian or follow the thin end of the wedge belief system. It's a simple observation that governments operate under the idea of growth of power. That is not to say an absence of government or reduction of government is good or better. But to recognize our role in maintain the social contract with the government. Abdicating that role entirely does not improve your life.
The only benefit of this legislation is that VPN's will get a bump in revenue, the web becomes more unusable and critical information gets stored at third parties who become high value targets for hacking. Not to mention these data brokers can easily turn around and begin to monetize this data. I'm not a privacy nut by any measure, but this seems like the most obvious major hit to personal data privacy. Instead of addressing the problem that is being claimed to be resolved, it's just lining another corporations pockets who will sell your data. We've seen this story play out many many times already. but you think this time will be different? I don't think so.
Just want to point out that Canada weaponised war time powers to debank truckers protesting during COVID. The rubicon has already been crossed. While I didn't support their cause, the writing is on the wall about what governments want to be able to do to people it finds inconvenient.
https://redact.dev/blog/how-and-why-people-are-being-arreste...
Police in the UK continue to arrest people for online posts that are reported as threatening, harassing, or grossly offensive.
Cases are commonly brought under communications and public order laws, including offenses tied to harassment, malicious communications, and hate incidents.
Closest the UK got, in recent years, to people getting punished specifically for criticising the government was that Mock the Week got cancelled. But not, say, Have I Got News For You, which has spent its entire existence doing nothing but.
Minecraft is notably insane due to this. I don’t know how normies get their kids playing online with it (ours is locked down to just-with-friends, and we gatekeep the friend list), I thought it was hard as a techie. Cross-platform play (outside of X-Box, I suppose) requires creating and carefully-massaging permissions on two overlapping but unrelated systems, both the account on the console itself and a Microsoft account (and their UI for managing this is, in modern Microsoft fashion, entirely nutty). Then, if anything goes wrong, the error messages are careful never to tell you which account’s settings blocked an action, so you get to guess. Fun!
(Getting “classic” Java Minecraft working, just with a local server, was even harder)
Your options are to go all-in on one or two ecosystems; to take on just a fuckload of work getting it all set up nicely and maintaining that with a half-dozen accounts per kid or whatever; or to give up.
Then schools send chromebooks home with less-restrictive settings than I’d use if I were managing it and no way for me to tighten those, and a kid stays up all night playing shovelware free Web games before we realize we need to account for those devices before bed time. Thanks for the extra work, assholes.
My son's cross country team communicates via GroupMe and it's very difficult for him to stay up-to-date with the web version from a laptop. My daughter's friend group communicates via snapchat.
This doesn't mean parents have to allow everything. My daughter doesn't have Snapchat, for example. But there are definite tradeoffs like her being left out of many conversations and slowly getting excluded from friend groups as a result.
It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.
It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban. A kid could be limited to an hour a day or phone use or something like that.
> It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.
The inevitable result would seem to be that all adults, parents or not, would be forced to present their identification online to use the internet. I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice, regardless of how noble the goal.
Limits help, for sure. But it's like setting limits for addictive products like "one cigarette a day". It's better than a pack a day but the impact addictive products have on kids don't stop once their limit is up.
> I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice
That's why I started by saying I don't have the solution. Regulation and fines for companies that target kids feels plausible. While not exactly the same, we curbed teen cigarette use by imposing marketing restrictions and issuing fines to tobacco companies (and drastically reduced adult smoking too for that matter).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_Un...
Phones are among the easiest devices to manage.
If those work, sure, although kids tend to be pretty clever about getting around parental controls and are sometimes quite a bit more technically sophisticated than their parents.
It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.
(And on some platforms it is, for practical purposes, impossible—looking at you, Linux, not just because it’s a powerful open platform but because its permissions and capabilities system is decades behind the state-of-the-art and tools for sensibly managing any of that on a scale smaller than “fleet of servers” and in the context of user-session applications are nonexistent)
I didn't claim that it's impossible, merely that it's difficult sometimes, as you also implied ("putting in tons of work"). The advantage of physically consfiscating phones is that it's a low tech, brute force method available even to the least technically sophisticated parents.
I'd push the implementation to the router and force root certs on devices and have all clients run through your proxy or drop the packets. That way even live usbs will not get network access. Have some separate, hugely locked down network for kids' friends.
Maybe put a separate honeypot network up with some iot devices on it with wifi and a weak password, and let the kids have some freedom once they figure out how to deauth and grab the bash upon reconnections.
Idk. I'm some years away from this problem myself,but someone recommended this in another thread recently.
That's a lot more difficult if you leave secureboot enabled on the computer. Plus, most devices, especially newer ones, allow you to pin your own certificates and sometimes even disable the OEM certs.
That, in addition with locking the BIOS with a password (and if the device does not have known OEM override passwords like on bios-pw.org), should be more than enough to keep a kid out.
Submit a zkp that you are over 18 to the website that requires it. The proof need not be tied to the identity of the user.
I personally don't think self-regulation works. It's harmful so the next best option is the government regulating it.
https://www.todayville.com/canada-moves-forward-with-digital...
https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/FINA/Brief/B... "Oct 7, 2022 — Recommendation 1: That the government drive economic growth by prioritizing and investing in the government's digital identity mandate."
However its saying digital validation for federal benefits - I mean given the amount of fraud in the US social security system of recent years it seems like having some kind of protection is important to not waste our tax payers benefit. And if you cross the border you are immediately in a digital system in the US.
That said this isn't saying digital identity for websites similar to what AUS is proposing.
When has this happened in the countries you listed?
"Oh, but it was 'our team' so it's different."
whatever
Also, that a was few dozen truckers who were actively blocking major highways, and the banking ban lasted less than a week for most people. Several orders of magnitude more people get arbitrarily unbanked for less. I had a credit card and bank account permanently banned while traveling and they refused to give me an explanation.
It's not really "amazing" at all, when you consider that the working class in those countries has finally woken up to the fact that their biggest present day issues, like housing unaffordability and low purchasing power, have been caused by the intentional fiscal policies of their governments over the last 30+ years, instead of the usual boogeymen (Xi Jinping, Putin, Covid, immigrants, etc).
And now after 20+ years of constantly vote hopping between left and right, hoping "this time it will be better than last time" but in practice it always ended up worse, the people are trying to hold them accountable for it, so the elite are switching tactics now that the ye olde reliable tactic of gaslighting the people doesn't work anymore.
If the carrot doesn't work anymore, time to move over to using the stick to keep the peasants in line.
Your request for evidence reminds me when the 3 telco operators in my country raised their prices simultaneously on the same day, and the nation's anti cartel watchdog said they found no evidence of price fixing lol
Just because the system is corrupt, incompetent or ineffective at finding evidence, doesn't mean there isn't collusion going on.
Edit: it works on HN (rule wise and moderation wise), so it could work on other platforms, too. Of course that would be expensive for the companies, but frankly, the companies are causing the current upset, so why not place the cost with the ones causing it instead of impacting everyone and even socialising the fallout like lawsuits.
1: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/rahm-emanuel-hey-lets...
2: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/816qf/rahm_eman...
Also the US is basically the only country which sees lethality as a "right".
On that subject, it's certainly a strange time to argue for government's role as the holder of a monopoly on the tools of violence, isn't it? The human consequences of this misguided philosophy ran well into eight figures in the 20th century alone.
In any case... say what you will about the US, we won't shoot you at the border for trying to leave.
Sounds like you think the argument people are making is that it ought to have the monopoly?
I think the argument is that whoever doesn't have that monopoly, can't call themselves a government… at least not for very long. Reason being, not having a monopoly necessarily requires someone else is doing violence and cannot be stopped by the so-called government, which means the so-called government is weak and at risk of being taken over, perhaps by the people doing the violence, perhaps by a outside "peacekeeping" force.
It's not OK for the government to have all the guns.
Given that, it's necessary to consider who should have legal access to guns and who should not.
What we call the "No-fly list" is an abhorrently-wrong way to do that.
Why?
The argument I've heard Americans give over the years is to stop authoritarian governments, to keep the government "scared" of the people.
Yet people in the USA are now being snatched off the street and deported for what is supposed to be protected by the first amendment: speech.
Clearly literally getting shot at didn't keep Trump "scared".
Unless you are saying you personally would join a US uprising, asking why armed people haven't yet started one yet themselves isn't a compelling arguement to disarm them. If people were shooting back I think you and most others would be condemning them.
That's not a condemnation of the people failing to replicate the Jan 6 thing while switching red flags for blue ones.
I'm saying the freedom to have guns didn't do the thing that people say it does.
I would go further: I also don't think private arms would work if y'all did start firing them, because who wins a civil war is more likely to depend who the military supports than private firearms, and if the military aren't the deciding factor for whatever reason (internal split within the military?) then it's down to whoever outside the country is supplying weapons/logistics to which side (so, probably China?)
And in an insurgency type situation private arms/small arms are extremely effective, if costly with lives. The US failing to subdue multiple countries long term despite having a tiny fraction the amount of small arms, veterans, or people directly involved in US logistics operations, is all the proof we need. Nobody wants that, it would be horrendous and bloody, but tanks and planes don't run off mere hopes and dreams and the US citizenry is more heavily armed by multiple factors than any other country or people in history.
If you disarm and roll over meekly, nobody is going to want to help you.
And if you know anything about Rahm Emanuel's background, you'd think he'd be the one waving this particular banner, but... (shrug)
How does this alleged virtue square away with everything else that's going on?
There ara bunch of murdered Venezuelan fishermen right now that never came even remotely close to the border, let alone transiting it in either direction.
"Say what you will about zombies eating your brains, at least they won't eat your eyes."
Completely the opposite of what you would hope.
From that point I would view social media essentially like alcohol.
As an adult you can choose to (ab)use it if you wish, but it's arguably the government's responsibility to protect children at large from social dangers like this.
It's absolutely a thing that people are asked to prove their age to buy alcohol, or even to enter a licensed venue that serves alcohol. I don't think I've ever heard anyone except underage teenagers complain about the invasion of privacy to hand over your ID for beer/etc.
Does the implementation around safe proof of age need work? Probably. Does that mean the whole thing is a not-so-subtle attempt to fire you for swearing?
I don't fucking think so mate.
People are already fired for saying stupid shit on social media, they're already debanked for being out-and-proud White Supremacists.
Given the current political situation in the USA and how it got there, if you have any illusions of a continuing democracy, you should be champing at the bit for anything which reduces social media use.
If they reported verifying my ID to the government every time I bought a drink I would complain about invasion of privacy.
The rest of your comment is a non sequitur.
- They bought porn from stores (no anonymity)
- They rented porn from hotel rooms
- They paid for it on pay per view channels (how many kids growing up in the 90s remember watching the fuzzy scrambled Spice channel and trying to make out a boob somewhere in the garbled picture?)
- They went to movie theaters for porn! I've never actually seen this but have read about it.
NONE of those actions are anonymous. They're even documented and associated with real identities.
If you're telling me that somehow adding some kind of verifiable age gates to things like porn (and social media) will lead to authoritarianism, we don't have to theorize. We ran this experiment already. And nobody had issues with it, realistically.
We're still running this experiment. If you try to watch an R rated movie in a theater, they will likely ask you for ID if you're clearly under 17. They used to do that to me growing up.
The current state of "Kids can access all this without any protection at any time" is abnormal. It's NOT normal.
We can all have a reasonable conversation here without always bringing in the authoritarianism boogeyman.
With online services, the identity would be tied to your account forever. A government would have the ability to review every passing comment you've made in your entire lifetime and know exactly who you are, who your family is, where you live, where you work, what your bank accounts are, etc.
The expectation of privacy from random unaffiliated humans seeing me pass on the sidewalk is very different from being stalked by a drone swarm that follows me and whatever vehicle I'm in.
So again, what changes in any fundamental way?
This is a tech forum. There are already standards that can be used to verify age without requiring a lot of extra info. (Already used by drivers licenses at TSA checkpoints, those are all standards).
There are ways to solve this without essentially saying “there is no alternative so let’s give nefarious companies access to our kids brains all the time”
You can use pseudonyms on practically all social media. That's under threat.
> There are ways to solve this without essentially saying “there is no alternative so let’s give nefarious companies access to our kids brains all the time”
It's ultimately the parents' responsibility, and the parents willingly gave their children access. It's very easy to setup parental controls. It's very easy to get your child a dumb phone. It's very easy to confiscate technology that their child isn't using responsibly. Adults should know that peer pressure isn't reason enough to give their children more freedoms than they're able to responsibly handle.
If people want to tackle this on a societal level, we should be looking into what's causing parents to be so lax in their parenting.
The USA seems to be doing the "if you ever criticize the government [there will be consequences]" part before the rest of them?
> It's amazing how coordinated it is.
It looks coordinated to you? Then why is the USA threatening tariffs etc. for the rest of us doing these things, even when they're going further?
Digital ID is not required...